Holiday...

The end of another busy week, and now I'm away on holiday till the fifteenth. Yay!

My regular pattern of having the week of my birthday off as annual leave has had to be discarded this year as I was planning to go away for some Serious Girls' Time with my mum and then she got landed with a hospital appointment in the middle of that week. As it's one of her eye injections and the window of opportunity for these is fairly small - they can be moved by a couple of days but no more - we had to change our plans. So last weekend I booked a trip back to Cyprus, flying out at 9am on Sunday morning. The forecast at the moment says sun, sun, sun...

I must just share the results of my latest tangle with spell-checker, though. It picked up the extra "s" I'd managed to stick on the end of "business", which was good, but then it got its teeth into some botanical names:

Pinus nigra = pin-up n*****
Heliconia rostrata = Helicon prostrate (bit tough on the Nine Muses, who are supposed to live on Helicon)
Thuja standishii = Thug sandshoe (surreal picture)
Zelkova serrata = Slovakian serrated (perhaps a kind of dragon?)

and my favourite, the beautiful Sacred Lotus, is
Nelumbo nucifera = Encumber Lucifer.

Funnies (pt 2) and freedom

The joys of spellchecker, part two:

Rudbeckia hirta = Rebecca Hart.
Wow - this could be a new way to invent names for fiction characters.

Less helpfully, a nice winter-flowering scented shrub comes to a smelly end:
Mahonia = ammonia. Ugh.

I'm off down to Cornwall tomorrow, hurrah - staying in a converted anchor foundry in Polruan. A week of sea air, decent fish and chips and proper scrumpy cider, walking and watercolour-painting. Peace and quiet and open air...

Have a good week, everyone!

Funnies...

The joys of using Spell-checker:
a way to cook eat and veg = a way to cook meat and vet
Arroz con leche (Spanish for rice pudding) = arrow con lechery

Oh, and in my lunch break I was copying out a recipe for a friend and I typed the marvellous term "bicarbonate of sofa". Which no spell-checker is ever going to spot.